In 2007, three Slovenian artists joined the conservative Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and officially changed their names to that of the leader of the party, the Prime Minister of Slovenia at the time, Janez Janša. While they renamed themselves for personal reasons, the boundaries between their lives and their art began to blur in numerous and unforeseen ways.

Since then, they have been living their private and public lives, working individually and collectively under the same name, and exploring the philosophical, psychological, political, biopolitical, historical, legal, economic, linguistic, and social implications of the name change; turning their lives into an ongoing performance and their art into a powerful means to question rituals and conventions, and to discuss the status and function of identity-related objects such as signatures, passports, ID cards, credit and debit cards.

Ten years later, this anthological exhibition offers an overview of this story which, although strongly rooted in Slovenia and its recent history, raises some universal questions about identity in the age of biopolitics and about art in the age of information; and casts it into the future, by announcing the registration of the Janez Janša name as a trademark for the next ten years. What’s in a name? How does it relate to ownership, legal status, self-perception and self-representation, profiling, surveillance, copyright and commodification of language, and related topics that define the contemporary condition? What’s an artwork and what are the boundaries that define it in relation to life, institutions and companies?

Co-produced by Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) and Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, and curated by independent curator Domenico Quaranta, Janez Janša® presents a comprehensive selection of works and projects produced by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša over the last ten years – most of them arising as collateral effects of the name change or other life events related to it. As an action pursued with no explicit artistic or political agenda, the name change sparked a series of consequences, reactions and interpretations that were either political or artistic. From an artistic perspective, the name change was perceived as either a performance or provocation. From a political perspective, it was perceived as either an act of political affiliation or resistance. These interpretations were often reflected in public statements and media stories. From a plain administrative perspective, the name change was seen as a regular procedure that – automatically or upon request – produced the related documents, such as ID cards and passports, birth and marriage certificates, and so on.

The exhibition is part of State Machines - Art, Work, and Identity in an Age of Planetary-Scale Computation, a project that investigates the new relationships between states, citizens and the stateless made possible by emerging technologies, focussing on how such technologies impact identity and citizenship, digital labour and finance.

Side programme in October:
- Conference Proper and Improper Names. Identity in the Information Society. Kino Šiška, 17 and 18 October 2017. More
- Documentary screening: My Name is Janez Janša (2012). Kinodvor, 22 October 2017 at 7 pm. More

Supported by: the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana

Sponsors: Marmor Hotavlje, Tam-Tam
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Janez Janša® is a trade mark, registered at the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) on February 17, 2017 under the trade mark number 016384364, owned by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša.

Marij Pregelj (1913–1967) is one of the key painters of modernism in the history of Slovene art. This retrospective exhibition presents the most extensive selection of Pregelj’s oeuvre in the past few decades, continuing Moderna galerija’s series of study exhibitions of the most outstanding Slovene modernists, which has in recent years presented the work of Marko Šuštaršičo and Gabrijel Stupica.

Pregelj developed a unique idiom of modernist painterly poetics in his oeuvre, introducing world-class figurative modernism in Slovenia and Yugoslavia with his autonomous artistic explorations. The main theme in Pregelj’s art is the human figure, mercilessly thrown into the senseless, violent chaos of a historical moment that cyclically repeats itself in forever new forms throughout the history of humankind: the violent absurdity of the extermination machine of the concentration camp is the archetypal image of the painter’s countless representations of human evil, aggression, (self-) destruction, pain, suffering, and death. On the other hand, Pregelj’s man is marked by his rebellious attitude, his will to revolt and fight, to survive, to preserve his individual life and that of the community. Characteristic of Pregelj’s figures are an epic pathos and the scream, be it in self-portraits, enigmatic images of grim companies at table, or in a modernist rendering of the national myth of the Battle of Sutjeska (mosaic in the Palace of the Federal Executive Council in Belgrade, 1962).

The exhibition features a selection of approximately 300 works in all the media Marij Pregelj employed in his artistic explorations (painting, drawing, printmaking, book illustration, and monumental mural mosaics). The goal is to present an overall view of the artist’s oeuvre by including works from Moderna galerija’s national collection and from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, which holds roughly half of Pregelj’s body of paintings, as bequeathed to the museum by the artist. In addition, certain works are being loaned by other Slovene public collections and private collectors.

Conceived as a classic monographic retrospective, the exhibition puts on view the crucial chronological stages in Pregelj’s artistic evolution: from early works under the influence of his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, with good examples of colour realism (portrait, landscape, self-portrait, and still life); to those based on the artist’s experiences in Italian and German concentration camps during World War II, when the key motif of people at the table emerged, and the artist was brought face to face with the true nature of Man; to the post-war period (up to 1957), in which Pregelj’s exploration of the pictorial field went from moderate realism to the modernist formal analysis of the painting. The main part of the exhibition, however, focuses on Pregelj’s best artistic output, that created between 1957 and 1967, when he produced the masterpieces that are now seen as iconic works of Slovene modernist heritage (this part includes all the main motifs of Pregelj’s personal artistic iconography: companies at table, self-portraits, human figures, female figures, and architecture). Most of the works presented are paintings, as this was Pregelj’s main area of artistic research; to this, however, is added a selection of drawings, prints, and illustrations showing his most spontaneous explorations and trials, as well as a projection of key examples of his monumental public art. In this way, the exhibition presents Pregelj’s oeuvre in a comprehensive, study-oriented display for the first time since the artist’s posthumous exhibition at Moderna galerija in 1969, cementing with the selection of his finest works his position at the peak of 20th century Slovene art.

An extensive catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition, including commissioned studies by Marko Jenko, PhD, Miklavž Komelj, PhD, Katarina Mohar, PhD, and Tomislav Vignjević, PhD, reprinted studies by Nadja Zgonik, PhD, and Svetlana Mitić, and a prologue by Martina Vovk, PhD, an exhaustive bio-bibliography by Jana Intihar Ferjan, and a comprehensive selection of colour reproductions of paintings, works on paper, and mosaics.